Bear in the Woods – Progress part 2

This is as far as I got traditionally with this piece. After the initial colored pencil underpainting I laid in a wash of warm yellow watercolor with a touch of purple splattered about to add some visual interest. I sealed it with a coat of workable fixative and then built up my shadow tones and the background with light washes of various greens in acrylics and then developed some local color into the foreground elements, again with acrylic. I then spent several hours refining my edges and adding texture with colored pencil.

This is the initial scan of the painting without any digital adjustment. While I was pretty satisfied with it overall, there were definitely some areas and effects that I wanted to push further but there are limits to my talents with the various media as I have really only been using them consistently for about a year at the point that I painted this. There is also only so much that the bristol will handle. The wax from the Prismacolors doesn’t always want to layer over the acrylics and the repeated washes start to pull the painting away from my work board no matter how thoroughly I tape it.

After scanning and stitching the image together in Photoshop I take the original and mount it permanently to some 1/8 inch paneling with gel medium.

Tomorrow I’ll post the initial work that I did from there on the computer.